Q 4. Explain the interrelationship of language skills. How does the classroom environment affect them?
Course: Elementary Education
Course Code 8623
Topics
Interrelationship of language skills
- language skills and classroom environment
AIOU Solved Assignment |Semester: Autumn/Spring | B.Ed/Bacherlors in Education /Masters in Education / PHD in Education | BEd / MEd / M Phil Education | ASSIGNMENT Course Code 8623| Course: Elementary Education
Answer:
The significance of listening skill
in effective communication has been recognized for a century. Rankin (1926)
conducted a study and found that listening skill was the most dominant skill
for the mode of human communication. However, there were no more similar
studies until the 1940s.
The base of listening inquiry was
primarily laid academically in the late 1940s and the founders (James Brown,
Ralph Nichols and Carl Weaver) of the listening skill were considered as the
“fathers of listening” (Vocile, 1987).
Listening skill was taken into the
second and foreign language research field in the mid 20th Century and many
researchers put listening as the focus of their studies. After half a century,
a professional committee International Listening Association (ILA) was
established in 1979 to develop listening skill (Feyten, 1991). Knowing how to
entail listening instruction and assessment in the school syllabi was the main
target of the pedagogy.
Steven (1987) pointed out that many
studies provide a focus on either understanding listening comprehension or
listening critically – agree or disagree with oral input.
Similarly, Floyed (1985) defines
listening as a process entailing hearing, attending to, understanding,
evaluating and responding to spoken messages. He further believes that
listeners should be active participants in the communication process.
The nature/purpose of listening
skills varies as the context of communication differs. Wolvin and Coakley
(1988) propose five different kinds of listening.
- First, discriminative listening helps listeners draw a
distinction between facts and opinions.
- Second, comprehensive listening facilitates understanding
oral input.
- Third, critical
listening allows listeners to analyse the incoming message before
accepting and rejecting it.
- Fourth,
therapeutic listening serves as a sounding board and lacks any critiques,
e.g., advising.
- Finally,
appreciative listening contributes listeners to enjoy and receive
emotional impressions.
All the varieties of listening help
to demonstrate that listening is an active process rather than a passive
product. The authors define the process of
listening as making sense of oral input by attending to the
message. Thus, this study adopts the second definition of listening –
understand the oral input mentioned by Wolvin and Coakley as a tool to evaluate
the research assumption.
The current study seeks to delve
into the correlation between listening and other skills in the International
English Language Testing System.
Language development
involves four fundamental and interactive abilities: listening, speaking, reading and
writing. The attempt has widely been made to teach four macro skills in second
and foreign language for more than 60 years.
Berninger and Winn (2006) emphasize
that external and internal environments interact with functional systems to an
extent, which the nature-nurture interaction at birth evolves over the course
of time. The question is how much and how long the basic skill of listening
gains attention in second and foreign language learning while listening is
recognized to play a significant role in primary and secondary language acquisition
(Ellis, 1994;
Faerch & Kasper, 1986). In the
1970s, the Communicative Language Teaching
(CLT) method was introduced to develop language learning
proficiency. Some prominent researchers (Asher, 1977;
Krashen, 1992) highlighted the
significance of listening in the pedagogy. Krashen (1992) has argued that
language acquisition highly depends on the decoding process of making sense of
incoming messages.
Language acquisition never occurs
without access to the comprehensible language input (Rost, 1994) because in addition to visual learning, more than three quarters
(80 %) of human learning occurs through listening direction (Hunsaker,
1990).
Returning to language acquisition, Nunan (2003) suggested
that listening is the gasoline that fuels the acquisition process. Thus, the
main reason experts emphasize the significance of listening in language
acquisition is the frequency of listening in language development.
However, much of the relevant
research incorporated into listening as an inevitable medium to drive primary
and secondary language acquisition. What is more, none of them focuses on the
relationship between listening skill and other language skills – speaking,
reading and writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL).
The current research study aims to fill this gap by providing empirical data obtained in a large-scale investigation of 1800 participants taking the international known language proficiency test – IELTS administered in the capital of Iran, Tehran.
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